London: For literature fans, it is the ultimate challenge - read the world's worst novelist out loud for as long as possible without laughing.
Belfast is to end its literary festival next Tuesday by asking fans to meet in a pub to recite the works of Amanda McKittrick Ros, accused by critics of penning some of the most atrocious books ever written.
The winner will be presented with a Barbara Cartland romantic novel, a return rail ticket to Ros' hometown of Larne and a copy of the writer's "how-to" handbook.
Her passion for alliteration in her romantic novels - Irene Iddesleigh, Delia Delaney and Helen Huddleston - attracted many mocking admirers among fellow writers like Tom Sawyer and Aldous Huxley.
But the Northern Ireland writer, who died in 1939, confidently predicted "I expect I will be talked about at the end of a thousand years."
She could be right. Today her notoriety lives on.
"We have some of the best writers in the world like Nobel prizewinning poet Seamus Heaney. So why not have the worst?" said David Lewis of the Culture Northern Ireland website which is organising the event.
"There are a lot of fans out there who are quite obsessive about her. We have had a great response," he told Reuters.
"We will choose the most ridiculous passages we can."
But fans could face a tough task reading from Irene Iddesleigh, a melodrama of a doomed marriage and unrequited love.
Ros writes "The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy and the tempted; the dead have evaded the flighty earthy future and form to swell the retinue of retired rights, the righteous school of the invisible and the rebellious roar of the raging nothing."
The Belfast read-in echoes a meeting of Oxford dons known as The Inklings who once met to read her works out loud - and see how long they could keep going without cracking up.
Among the group were two literary giants in C S Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and J R R Tolkien, creator of The Lord of Rings.
Ros herself would rage against critics, calling them "evil-minded snapshots of spleen" and "auctioneering agents of Satan."
So what would she make of the Belfast challenge?
Lewis said: "Almost 70 years after her death we are still talking about her. We are doing this in a fond but ironic way." "
The winner will get a Barbara Cartland novel so they do not make the same mistake again. On the day we will go to the nearest charity shop and pick up one of the mass of Cartland novels on the shelves."
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